In the past few decades, the petroleum industry has invested heavily in the development of marine survey techniques that yield knowledge of subterranean formations beneath a body of water in order to find and extract valuable mineral resources, such as oil and natural gas. High-resolution seismic images of a subterranean formation are essential for quantitative seismic interpretation and improved reservoir monitoring. For a typical towed marine survey, an exploration vessel tows one or more physical sources such as seismic sources and one or more streamers below the surface of the water and over a subterranean formation to be surveyed for mineral deposits. The vessel contains data acquisition equipment, such as navigation control, physical source control, data receiver control, and recording equipment. The physical source control causes the one or more physical sources to produce physical fields at selected times. Physical fields may be electric fields, magnetic fields, electromagnetic wave fields, or acoustic wave fields that interact with the water and the subterranean formation. Different types of rock may possess different physical properties and affect these physical fields differently. The streamers towed behind the vessel are elongated cable-like structures. Each streamer includes a number of data receivers or sensors that detect the physical fields underwater as affected by the water and the subterranean formation.
However, acquiring high quality high resolution data in a marine environment may be relatively expensive and complex. Techniques used to determine physical properties based on data measurements may or may not be effective and reliable. As a result, those working in this industry continue to seek systems and methods to improve performance of analyzing physical properties of a particular region based on collected physical field data.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
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